CentOS 6.1 appears a day after RHEL 6.2 comes out

LINUX DISTRIBUTION CentOS has finally released CentOS 6.1 for i386 and x86-64 architectures.

CentOS, which is based upon Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL), has been falling behind in recent releases from the upstream RHEL distribution to the point where some observers were worried about its future. But just a day after Red Hat announced RHEL 6.2, the CentOS team released CentOS-6.1.

As CentOS is built from RHEL, it's no surprise that CentOS-6.1 is pretty much RHEL 6.1, which was released back in May. Back then RHEL 6.1 was mainly full of security patches and bug fixes, with updates to storage capabilities, virtualisation and resource management.

Although CentOS 6.1 is essentially RHEL 6.1, the development team has modified the Linux kernel, Firefox, Apache HTTPD, yum and a number of other packages. As is standard, all Red Hat branding has been removed along with a number of Red Hat specific packages.

Although CentOS releases have been growing fewer and farther between, it is still an extremely popular Linux distribution among those who want the stability of RHEL but don't require a support contract. Another RHEL based distribution, Scientific Linux, has also been growing in popularity, especially as some CentOS users have started to question whether the distribution was heading for obscurity.